trisweb.com

I have a lot of negative feelings toward Real Player, mostly because of their web site, and that the link to the free player is misleading and the opposite of obvious. Here, this one is better: Download the Free Real Player 10. Seriously though, it’s better than RealOne (mostly just faster), which I’ve had for too long, and it uses the “open-source” Helix DNA project code. Man, if any other program (ahem– Winamp) had good support for Real formats, I would immediately remove this crap from my computer; but if you get rid of all the startup programs, the message center, etc. then it’s not so bad, and frankly, this new version is worth upgrading to if you come across anything of Real format on the web (like webcasts of my CS class, for example).

What a wonderful day it has been, as Easter Sundays usually are. Had an egg-hunt this morning (too early, mind you) and I lost by only one egg (all in good fun), followed by softball.

Last night I went to Kinko’s to get a proof of a brochure we’re printing — it’s amazing how they treat you when you’re printing 15,000 of something. It looks surprisingly good on glossy paper. After that I came home and dyed the easter eggs, in-between calls from my Dad from the other side of the world, in Hong Kong. Sometimes technology amazes me. There was absolutely no delay in our conversation, at least not that we could notice, and we were both on cell phones. Heck, they even have the same area code. Pretty incredible if you think about it.

The night before last I saw James Carter [iTunes] at Yoshi’s, and man was it good. The music was some of the best jazz I’ve heard in a long time, and even better was that the guys were just having a blast on stage. Just a great show.

And I think I’ve said this before, but whoever thought of putting Jazz and Sushi together was a genius. ::

I’ve been exploring iTunes and the rest of the web recently in search of new music, and I have been very successful.

Damien Rice [iTunes] is an Irish singer-songwriter with an incredible voice and an amazing talent for writing very moving songs (”Eskimo” is one of the best pieces of music I’ve heard in a long time). I do believe I’ll go buy his CD “O” between classes today (Yes, it’s on iTunes, but tell me I’m not the only one who hears deficiencies in 128k AAC).

Sarah Harmer also has a new album, “All of our Names” [iTunes] out, which I’ve been waiting for for some time. It’s very good, and much more consistent and polished than her first CD. It has the same feel to it though; her voice is perfectly in tune and has a warm timbre, which makes all her songs beautiful.

Now here’s something really cool — Sarah Harmer had a live recording with the CBC; 6 songs from her new album recorded live in their studio. The thing is, the quality is phenomenal. These guys must have some incredible recording engineers, not to mention web developers who appreciate good sound. The recording is available in 176kbps Real Audio from their site called “Just Concerts”. It’s not Ogg Vorbis, but it still sounds great, and does the recording justice. Go listen to it! And thanks to Steven Garrity for finding this! ::

This guy gutted a G5 and put an Athlon in it. Yikes.

I used to hate Macs… after all, they were a lot worse 5 or 6 years ago. And then OSX happened, and they became X times better. Now I want one, but I’ll have to live with my lame old PC for another few years because I’m a poor college student.

I’m actually very impressed with the performance of my computer. It’s been extremely responsive lately, probably ever since I installed an extra 512 MB of RAM. (Let me tell you, if you don’t have a gigabyte of RAM, get a gigabyte of RAM). I also keep my computer extremely clean. Spotless. No icons on the desktop. Perfectly organized directories. Heck, I even have a hard disk dedicated to virtual memory. It helps to know what you’re doing when using a PC.

Honestly though, we should all be using Macs. Sigh. ::

Nothing really happened to me today… (er, yesterday). But then again, I didn’t go asking for trouble.

Some hilarious web jokes did happen though. My favorite: Stopdesign and Mezzoblue switched designs. Beautiful, and a great satire of the problem these guys have been talking about quite a bit — CSS and web design theft. There’s no penalty for plagiarizing a web site, so unfortunately it’s done quite a bit. If you’re a designer, do the web a favor — your own work.

Other than that, slashdot has had the occasional funny story– or a lot of useless ones at least.

Happy April. Things are lookin’ up! ::

Mezzoblue- Hi-Fi Design with CSS - design inspiration for today.

I made this site design using CSS when I was just on the virge of discovery of its power and beauty, and frankly, I wasn’t very successful at my aim — I wanted to make a simple, light design with the focus on a single thematic element, mainly the rotating image at the top. But it’s too cluttered, and there isn’t true separation of content and design. Anyway.

CSS is really where web design is going. It’s truly amazing how everything makes sense contextually in a well-designed CSS-based site. The content is completely separate from the design, making design changes, making browser incompatabilities, and accessibility completely trivial. They’re automatic if you do it right. It’s beautiful.

I love sharing this epiphany with people, like my fellow designers on the Cal Band comp comm, where our initial meeting went on for 4 hours after I showed everyone the Zen Garden, and our entire concept of design itself changed. I’ve learned a lot designing for the new Cal Band web site, which will be up come April 17th, and I do believe that I am becoming a better designer with each project.

From the article above — “If you?re a designer who?s been using [CSS] for a while, uh, where?s your Zen Garden design, huh? I?m waiting.” That is one of my ultimate goals. To design something worthy of the garden. I think that if I had the time, I could do it right now. It might take me a few tries, but man it would be fun. Maybe I should redo this site first. It needs to be the main trisweb.com site first, integrated with the rest of the site, which just needs to be rethought entirely. I think I’ll make that my summer project. Though really I should be doing things for cash instead.

Ha, I act like there are serious web designers reading my little weblog. Well, maybe someday (no offense if you’re a serious web designer). ::